2.01.2011

Weather-driven pirate risk maps

A varietyofsources point out that Naval Research Labs' James Hansen* has come up with a piracy-risk model that takes as its two major sources of input current and forecasted weather and in-field reports on pirate activity:

"Usually, I'm doing theoretical stuff down in the weeds," said Hansen, a Seattle-area native and applied mathematician at the Naval Research Laboratory in Monterey, Calif. "This is the only project where I can actually show pictures of the impact," he said, projecting images of Somali boatmen armed with missile-launchers and automatic weapons.

The quote is from an article in the Seattle Times about a presentation that Hansen gave at the American Meteorological Society meeting. The model is driven by the fact that most if not all modern piracy depends on small, fast boats that can evade long-distance detection and can outpace larger slower cargo ships. In heavy weather the boats can't operate. Combine weather forecasts with observed pirate activity and voilà.

I can't locate any sort of working paper at present, so if any of y'all locate it please do send it to me. And as I wrote to the sdev-internal email list: someone please please please write a paper using this ASAP. Just be careful of your exclusion restrictions.

* As Sol points out: "How many climate scientists are named James Hansen? I now know of 3."